The Transposition of Gothic

David Morse

{50} The publication of The Monk by Matthew Lewis in 1796 marked a decisive
turning-point in the development of Gothic. Other writers of the
1790s, such as Radcliffe,
Bage and Holcroft, had taken over a genteel literary tradition
and attempted to open it up by broaching within its parameters
themes of personal and political liberation. Since their
paramount value was reason, they felt obliged to maintain a
consistent moral perspective in their work. Oddly, The
Monk too is written from a rationalistic point of view and
there is much in it that is consistent with the radical temper
of the times, but it is marked off from its predecessors by its
unequivocal character as a work of popular literature, by its
frank espousal and even exultation in the erotic, in violence,
in the horrors of the supernatural. Where Mrs Radcliffe
presented mysterious happenings and then explained them away,
Lewis presented the satanic as real; where she hinted at illicit
sensuality and gestured towards obscure crimes, Lewis openly
presented and described. What made the book all the more
disturbing was the equivocal attitude which Lewis took towards
his subject: behind a genteel deploring of such nefarious
goings-on can be discerned a humanistic point of view, similar
to that Diderot, which sees
the religious and ascetic life as unnatural because it
contradicts the essential nature of man; but at the back of that
is the implication that man is most truly himself when most
utterly perverse: that is to say, when he follows deep and
unexplained impulses within him. The Monk reflects the
intellectual ferment and confusion in the aftermath of the
French Revolution: its clearest message is the disintegration of
all traditional moral values and one which the Gothic
iconography is able to present with the utmost force.

{51} Virtually all the paradoxes of The Monk are linked
with its pretensions to be a polemic against the Catholic
Church. Lewis can write
about Catholicism with confidence, secure in the knowledge that
his Protestant readers will be only too ready to concur in his
condemnation, without examining too closely the standpoint from
which the condemnation is made. Lewis alternates between an
indictment characteristic of the Reformation period, in which
the church is seen as a decadent and morally corrupt
institution, propagating mystifying doctrines to deceive the
people while licensing practices that are morally abhorrent, and
a more contemporary view in which the church is seen as
violating man's natural instincts. Significantly anti-Catholic
literature of the Reformation and post-Reformation period,
dealing with licentious monks and so forth, was an important
source both for Lewis himself and for other writers of the Romantic period. Lorenzo,
in The Monk, though a Catholic in Spain during the period
of the Inquisition, adopts towards the church the stance of a
good Protestant:

Universal silence prevailed through the crowd, and every heart
was filled with reverence for religion -- every heart but
Lorenzo's. Conscious that among those who chanted the praises of
their God so sweetly, there
were some who cloaked with devotion the foulest sins, their hymns
inspired him with detestation at their hypocrisy. He had long
observed with disapprobation and contempt the superstition which
governed Madrid's inhabitants. His good sense had pointed out to
him the artifices of the monks, and the gross absurdity of their
miracles, wonders, and suppositious relics. He blushed to see his
countrymen the dupes of deceptions so ridiculous, and only wished
for an opportunity to free them from their monkish fetters. The
opportunity, so long desired in vain, was at length presented to
him. He resolved not to let it slip, but to set before the
people, in glaring colours, how enormous were the abuses but too
frequently practised in monasteries, and how unjustly public
esteem was bestowed indiscriminately upon all who wore a
religious habit. He longed for the moment destined to unmask the
hypocrites, and convince his countrymen that a sanctified
exterior does not always hide a virtuous heart.1

{52} There is also much in Lewis's criticism of the church that
is consonant with the views of Godwin and other radical
contemporaries. The novel points to the dangers of absolute and
irresponsible use of power, so that the prioress can commit
murder (or contemplate it) without fear of retribution and can
even deny a papal bull. Hypocrisy and lack of openness are
identified as the gravest of moral crimes. The dangers
associated with closed institutions and the excessive practice
of secrecy are insisted upon. Like Godwin, Lewis also shows
that justice or the lack of it is bound up with one's position
in society: Agnes can have the severest punishments inflicted
upon her, while Ambrosio and the prioress can act with complete
impunity. The irrational is displayed as the means by which
arbitrary power is masked and veiled. For Lewis everything that
is connected with the institutional is false; it is therefore
fitting that the novel should reach its climax with the
destruction of the convent of St Clare. Since many religious
institutions were similarly invaded during the French
Revolution, it is difficult not to see Lewis as associating
himself with the destruction of an irrational and oppressive
past - its replacement by a society based more securely on the
principles of human nature.

Critical discussions of The Monk tend to focus
obsessively on the character of Ambrosia; yet it is crucial to
any understanding of the novel to recognise both its polycentric
character and the intricacy of its construction. In particular
it is clear that the story of the Bleeding Nun, or the History
of Don Raymond, as it is known, is not an exotic interpolation
but is the motif that underlies everything else, as it is
subjected to various permutations. Lewis took the theme of the
Bleeding Nun from traditional German literature, but there
can be little doubt but that Lewis clearly understood its erotic
significance -- the repression of female sexuality. For Lewis's
purpose it was necessary to show that convents, as much as
monasteries, were unnatural places and that the confinement of
women within them involved the denial of their libidinal
instincts as well as their capacity for bearing children. The
myth of the Bleeding Nun is built around a structural opposition
between the fact that the nun is veiled and the fact that she is
bleeding. The veil stands for the traditional chastity ascribed
to women, the fact that their charms are traditionally covered,
the belief that sex {53} does not and need not concern them.
The symbol of the veil is contradicted by the symbol of blood,
which implies both the defloration of the virgin and the
menstrual flow, which is a perpetual sign of a woman's capacity
to have children. Significantly, in the story of the Bleeding
Nun, Beatrice has been early confined in a convent, but her
highly sexed nature cannot be concealed and she exchanges the
role of nun for that of mistress. Her death at the hand of her
lover Otto and her repeated and regular reappearances strongly
suggest that the sexual nature of woman cannot be denied: she
will keep returning to haunt a world that refuses to give it a
place and truly acknowledge it. In the case of Matilda the
nature of the veil becomes completely explicit:

Oh, since we last conversed together, a dreadful veil has been
rent from before my eyes. I love you no longer with the devotion
which is paid to a saint; I prize you no more for the virtues of
your soul; I lust for the enjoyment of your person. The woman
reigns in my bosom, and I am become a prey to the wildest of
passions.2

At this moment, the meaning of 'woman' becomes transvalued.

Thematic doubling is a notable feature of literature of the Romantic period and The
Monk is no exception. Lewis lays great stress on the idea
of the erotic woman, and all the female characters in the novel
are shown to be highly sexed -- in fact, the women
characteristically take the initiative. Baroness Lindenberg
presses her attentions on Don Raymond in a way that he finds
embarrassing. Marguerite, who aids him when he is in danger
from brigands, describes her nature as being 'licentious and
warm'.3 When
it is suggested that Agnes be confined within a convent, Lewis
refers to this as 'a fate so contrary to her inclinations'.4 Ambrosio is
initiated into the delights of sex by Matilda in a way that
strongly recalls the corruption of Adam by Eve. Even the beautiful Virginia
de Villa Franca is induced to give up the veil by the fact that
Lorenzo's 'person pleased her'.5 The only woman character whose
modesty is stressed is Antonia, but even here Lewis hints at the
passion that lurks behind her reserved demeanour. In the
opening description of her on her appearance at the church of
the Capuchins in Madrid -- where she is {54} significantly
veiled and refuses to unveil (a veiling paralleled by the early
appearance of Matilda as Rosario, who always keeps her head
muffled in a cowl) -- Lewis notes, 'She appeared to be scarcely
fifteen; an arch smile, playing round her mouth, declared her to
be possessed of liveliness which excess of timidity at present
repressed.'6
Her age is, of course, highly pertinent: she is just at the
point of becoming conscious of herself as a woman and of her own
sexuality. This is betrayed by her constant blushing, which is
insisted upon by Lewis at virtually every point in the
narrative. Her cheeks are 'suffused with blushes'7, 'a deep
blush'8
spreads across her cheek, her cheeks are 'suffused with
Crimson'.9
This only confirms the veil- blood opposition of the narrative:
Antonia though veiled nevertheless has erotic feelings, which
are disclosed by the appearance of blood in her cheeks. The
whole novel can be seen as a struggle between those who conceal
or deny the nature of feminine sexuality and those who seek to
bring it out into the open. For this reason it is symbolically
appropriate that Agnes after her terrible sufferings should
finally be freed from the convent of St Clare and enabled to
marry Don Raymond; for Agnes has become identified with the
Bleeding Nun and her liberation signifies the ending of the
nightmare induced by the false and unnatural ideal of
chastity.

The motif of the veil that conceals feminine sexuality is
doubled and paralleled by the mask of sanctity that covers the
uncontrollable desires of Ambrosia. This symmetrical relation
is apparent from the opening scene in the church of the
Capuchins: Antonia is introduced as the veiled woman, Ambrosio
as 'the man of holiness'10 -- a transparent disguise, since
as soon as he is alone he 'gave free loose to the indulgence of
his vanity'11; humility is only a 'semblance'12, pride the
reality. This first chapter announces, in the manner of an
overture, the principle themes of the novel: Antonia's
reluctance to unveil, even in church as is customary, can be
seen as symbolically contradicting the assumption that there is
nothing to offend a woman's modesty in church, while both
Lorenzo's dream and the gypsy's prophecy suggest that in a
future confrontation between Ambrosio and Antonia all such
cultural concealments of the nature of sexuality will be thrown
aside. Indeed, the theme of the picture strongly suggests that
Ambrosio's religious fervour is a deflection from the path of
{55} normal profane love. Matilda, who has presented her image
to Ambrosio in the masked form of a Madonna hopes that when
Ambrosio gazes upon it a response may be kindled by it that goes
beyond mere piety: 'With what pleasure he views this picture!
With what fervour he addresses his prayers to the insensible
image! Ah, may not his sentiments be inspired by some kind of
secret genius, friend to my affection? May it not be man's
natural instinct which informs him -- ?'13

Ambrosio's progress through the novel is not from sensuality to
spirituality, but from the spiritual to the sensual; but, what
is still more important, Lewis suggests that Ambrosio as a model
of religious piety, as a man who does not even know the
difference between the sexes, can only be bogus; when erotically
obsessed, he is most completely genuine. Moreover, Lewis is
perfectly clear that it is culture that prevents the free
expression and fulfilment of his desires: 'The danger of
discovery, the fear of being repulsed, the loss of reputation --
all these considerations counselled him to stifle his
desires.'14
Nevertheless, Lewis suggests that because of his education
within religious institutions Ambrosio's sexuality has become
warped. His heart has been corrupted by a thoroughgoing
Catholic education, so that it is no longer possible for him to
respond in a completely spontaneous and authentic manner. His
education has been an initiation into moral iniquity:

His instructors carefully repressed those virtues, whose grandeur
and disinterestedness were ill-suited to the cloister. Instead of
universal benevolence, he adopted a selfish partiality for his
own particular establishment: he was taught to consider
compassion for the errors of others as a crime of the blackest
dye; the noble frankness of his temper was exchanged for servile
humility; and in order to break his natural spirit, the monks
terrified his young mind, by placing before him all the horrors
with which superstition could furnish them; they painted to him
the torments of the damned in colours the most dark, terrible and
fantastic, and threatened him at the slightest fault with eternal
perdition. No wonder that his imagination, constantly dwelling
upon fearful objects, should have rendered his character timid
and apprehensive. Add to this, that his long absence from the
great world, and total unacquaintance with the common {56}
dangers of life, made him form of them an idea far more dismal
than the reality. While the monks were busy in rooting out his
virtues and narrowing his sentiments, they allowed every vice
which had fallen to his share to arrive at full perfection. He
was suffered to be proud, vain, ambitious, and disdainful: he was
jealous of his equals, and despised all merit but his own: he was
implacable when offended, and cruel in his revenge.15

The position that Lewis
adopts is one very characteristic of the Enlightenment. Since
man's natural inclinations are good, it is only necessary to
give them scope for expression; in contact with others and with
the opposite sex, in an expanded commerce with the ordinary
world, his benevolence and sympathy for others can expand and
flourish. The passions, when acknowledged and given latitude,
can also be directed and controlled. A religious education, on
the other hand, denies a man's essential nature, cuts him off
from his fellow men, develops irrational prejudices and partial
sympathies. The Monk is a lesson in the catastrophic
consequences of such an education: desires that under other
circumstances would be natural in Ambrosio become perverse and
are deflected from their appropriate forms of expression: erotic
tenderness is transformed into sadistic negativity and
violence.

That Ambrosio represents the working out in a perverse form of
normal human desires is clearly demonstrated by a counter-plot
of Don Raymond and Agnes: just as Matilda/ Rosario pursues
Ambrosio into the monastery and attempts to awaken his natural
impulses, so Don Raymond follows Agnes and attempts to secure
her release from the convent. Don Raymond's disguise as a
gardener's assistant repeats Matilda's disguise as a religious
novice. However, there is a very crucial difference between the
two cases: Ambrosio has been so long cut off from a pattern of
normal relations between the sexes that his desires, when
awakened, can find no adequate object; it is his tragedy that
his self-discovery necessary leads him on a downward path of
self- destruction.

The conflict between eros and the Catholic Church in
The Monk also has the form of a conflict between life and
death. The church is associated with rottenness, putrescence,
decay: {57} the transformation of life into death. Indeed this,
for Lewis, is precisely the function fulfilled by the monastery
or convent. The church is unnatural, for, instead of
acknowledging that the living and the dead are mutually
exclusive categories, in its preoccupation with the dead and in
its denial of life, it represents the means whereby the world of
the living is invaded by the world of the dead. That the church
is an institution which contradicts human nature is emphasised
by Lewis in the opening lines of the novel: 'The audience now
assembled in the Capuchin church was collected by various
causes, but all of them were foreign to the ostensible motive.
The women came to show themselves -- the men, to see the
women.'16
Sexual attraction, not religiosity, is the real motive for the
gathering; but, while normal human instincts can express
themselves through the forms prescribed by religious convention,
the church also has a sinister significance: as a mechanism
whereby the living are transformed into the dead. Ambrosia by a
process of religious instruction, is made into a monster of
virtue, a man made unnatural as well as hypocritical by the
pretence that he is not touched by human feeling.
Significantly, his sexual awakening is also associated with
revival from death: it is only after Matilda has sucked the
venom from a deadly snake bite and after he is restored to
consciousness that he also becomes aware of her nature as a
woman and his initiation into the erotic takes place. The
struggle between eros and death is also worked out in the
theme of the Bleeding Nun and through its relation to Agnes.
The denial of eros in the case of Beatrice with
catastrophic consequences is nearly repeated with Agnes, who is
thwarted in her attempt to escape with Don Raymond, her lover,
through the fact that her own impersonation of the Bleeding Nun
is inverted, when the spectre of the Bleeding Nun is thought by
Don Raymond to be Agnes. The appearance of the Bleeding Nun --
herself a symbol of the cultural repression of female sexuality
-- represents an invasion of the world of the living by the
world of the dead. As a result, Agnes is confined within a
convent, proclaimed dead, given what is apparently poison, and
then discovered in the subterranean vaults in a state that can
only be described as half alive. Simultaneously Don Raymond
himself has endured a severe illness and been on the point of
death. Thus the restoration of both to health {58} and to each
other represents a fitting negation of the negation. This state
of being between life and death is paralleled by Ambrosio and
Antonia. The multiple symbolic deaths of Agnes also befall
Antonia: first rendered insensible by mysterious powers, then
buried in a state of suspended consciousness, from which she
revives only to be slain by Ambrosia. Although Antonia is the
most modest and virtuous feminine character in the book, her
death figures symbolically as a punishment both of Lorenzo, her
lover, and herself for their denial of eros. Their
relations become so veiled and so oblique as to become virtually
non-existent:

Having thrown a veil over her face, she ventured to look out. By
the light of the moon, she perceived several men below with
guitars and lutes in their hands; and, at a little distance from
them, stood another wrapped in a cloak, whose stature and
appearance bore a strong resemblance to Lorenzo's. She was not
deceived in this conjecture: it was indeed Lorenzo himself, who,
bound by his word not to present himself to Antonia without his
uncle's consent, endeavoured, by occasional serenades, to
convince his mistress that his attachment still existed. This
strategem had not the desired effect. Antonia was far from
supposing that this nightly music was intended as a compliment to
her. She was too modest to think herself worth such attentions;
and, concluding them to be addressed to some neighbouring lady,
she grieved to find that they were offered by Lorenzo.17

Lorenzo's obedience to social norms of behaviour leads to the
masking of both his own and Antonia's feelings. In this scene
she is veiled, while he adopts a disguise. The bashfulness of
both means the fulfilment of Lorenzo's nightmare at the opening
of the novel -- not his dream. The appropriation of life by
death is most distinctly articulated in the case of Ambrosio
himself. His relations with Antonia assume a perverse form, in
which he can only deal with her as an inert object -- not as a
living human being. Ambrosio's erotic impulses are totally
transposed into an obsession with death:

By the side of three putrid half-corrupted bodies lay the {59}
sleeping beauty. A lively red, the forerunner of returning
animation, had already spread itself over her cheeks, and, as
wrapped in a shroud she reclined upon her funeral bier, she
seemed to smile at the images of death surrounding her. While
he gazed upon their rotting bones and disgusting figures, who
perhaps were once as sweet and lovely, Ambrosio thought upon
Elvira, by him reduced to the same state. As the memory of that
horrid act glanced upon his mind, it was clouded with a gloomy
horror; yet it served but to strengthen his resolution to
destroy Antonia's honour.18

At this point all the implications of Lewis's opening quotation from
Measure for Measure,

Lord Angelo is precise;
Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone

are symbolically realised. In Shakespeare's terms Ambrosio is
shown to be homologous with both bread and stone: he has the
feelings and desires of a normal man but expresses them in a
perverse form, so that his eroticism has no more appropriate
setting than catacombs, filled with decaying bodies. This is
the price that Ambrosio pays for his long-standing suppression
and hypocritical denial of sexuality. It is a particular irony
of the book that Lewis should actually suggest that Ambrosio's
principal mistake was to choose an unsuitable setting for his
advances: 'The aspect of the vault, the pale glimmering of the
lamp, the surrounding obscurity, the sight of the tomb, and the
objects of mortality which met her eyes on either side, were ill
calculated to inspire her with the emotions by which the friar
was agitated!'19 Ambrosio possesses absolute power
over Antonia: 'Resistance is unavailing, and I need disavow my
passion for you no longer. You are imagined dead; society is
forever lost to you. I possess you here alone; you are
absolutely in my power.'20 She is assigned to the world of
the dead -- like Agnes: a terrorism only possible within the
closed institutions of the church. It is the church which
sanctions such dominance and which denies women freedom and
autonomy as human beings. Ambrosio's perverted sexuality, {60}
which can only express itself as violence, as wounding and
bruising, is an inevitable consequence of a society in which
sexual relations assume repressed and mystified forms.

Nevertheless, Lewis is not an
unqualified sexual libertarian. Lewis recognised that a free
and spontaneous sexuality necessarily implied the
acknowledgement of feminine sexuality, and he saw the harm
caused by its denial; but when it came down to it he was as
fearful of opening this Pandora's box as anyone else. Indeed,
The Monk can also be read as an allegory of the rejection
of female sexuality by Monk/Lewis! Ambrosio is at first
delighted to be initiated into sexual mysteries by Matilda, but
he quickly tires of her because she always takes the initiative
and assumes a dominant and demanding role:

But a few days had passed since she appeared the mildest and
softest of her sex, devoted to his will, and looking up to him as
to a superior being. Now she assumed a sort of courage and
manliness in her manners and discourse, but ill-calculated to
please him. She spoke no longer to insinuate, but to command: he
found himself unable to cope with her in argument, and was
unwillingly obliged to confess the superiority of her judgement.
Every moment convinced him of the astonishing powers of her mind;
but what she gained in the opinion of the man, she lost with
interest in the affection of the lover.2 1

It is in response
to this threatening reversal of sex roles that Ambrosio reverts
to a more passive and acceptable form of femininity -- the
chaste and gentle Antonia. Ambrosio is in fact in an erotic
double bind, from which there can be no escape: he could enjoy
liberated sexuality with a woman whom he finds intimidating and
therefore not erotic, but he is attracted towards a woman with
whom erotic fulfilment is not possible -- indeed, the eroticism
of Antonia is connected with taboo, the transgression of which
would also destroy the erotic, as the rape scene itself clearly
demonstrates. The erotic appears itself as a phantom, forever
intangible, forever out of reach. The demonic conclusion of
The Monk has a certain psychological truth, if Lewis
himself is far from the moral pietism which it notionally
invokes: the dream of freedom and fulfilment has turned into a
nightmare.

{61} Although Lewis sealed Ambrosio's fate with terrifying
retribution and punishment, he nevertheless did write The
Monk very much from the point of view of his demonic hero --
so much so that there can be little doubt that the longing for
erotic liberation, and the anxiety which the prospect induces,
is Lewis's own. Lewis ostensibly deplored the duplicity and
sensuality of Ambrosia but his manner of exhibiting Ambrosio's
awakening has powerfully amoral overtones. For Ambrosio could
only be moral as long as he was not acquainted with his own
erotic drives, and, if his consciousness of them left him no
alternative but to follow them, there could only be one
conclusion: that the appearance of morality could only be
hypocritical and inauthentic, that the strength of a man's
impulses becomes for him at once truth and nemesis. The
Monk, for contemporary readers, was shocking simply in the
garishness of its surface details, but it also disconcerted at
this deeper level. For, although Lewis had retained damnation, he
had nevertheless very effectively disposed of morality!

The new orientation which Lewis gave to the Gothic is clearly written in
the subsequent development of the genre. It emerges with
particular clarity in the case of Mrs Radcliffe's The
Italian, published in 1797. Although there
is a definite continuity with her earlier The Mysteries of
Udolpho in the way in which a feminist point of view is
linked with the critique of arbitrary power, there is also -- in
Russian formalist terms -- a distinct shift in the nature of the
dominant. Innocence is still for Mrs Radcliffe, as it
was not for Lewis, a meaningful and realisable value, but the
opposition between innocence and madness is transposed into a
contrast between innocence and hypocrisy. It is also important
to note that Mrs Radcliffe's attitude towards reason undergoes
some modification. Her earlier novels were concerned to show
how crucial was the role of reason in the struggle against the
forces of oppression and irrational domination and such an
emphasis continues to be felt in The Italian. It is
important that Vivaldi, Ellena's lover, should have an
understanding 'sufficiently clear and strong to teach him to
detect many errors of opinion, that prevailed around him, as
well as to despise the common superstitions of his country',22 and it is
equally significant that Schedoni, the hypocritical monk and
dominant figure in the {62} novel, should be shown as alienated
from truth, to which both reason and feeling should lead. But
Schedoni also exemplifies the tortuousness of reason, its
ability to become alienated from itself through the very
complexity and deviousness of its own workings:

The elder brothers of the convent said that he had talents, but
denied him learning; they applauded him for the profound
subtlety which he occasionally discovered in argument, but
observed that he seldom perceived truth when it lay on the
surface; he could follow it through all the labyrinths of
disquisition but overlooked it, when it was undisguised before
him. In fact he cared not for truth, nor sought it by bold and
broad argument, but loved to exert the wily cunning of his
nature in hunting it through artificial perplexities. At
length, from a habit of intricacy and suspicion, his vitiated
mind could receive nothing for truth, which was simple and
easily comprehended.23

Here is a great paradox. The Gothic novel shows a new
awareness of the intricacy of mental processes that represents
one of its most significant claims on our attention, yet what it
exhibits it also deplores. The truth is there, open and
transparent, yet man in his perversity cuts himself off from it.
The most crucial and fundamental moral issues become badly
blurred. Schedoni criticises the Marchese, Vivaldi's father, on
the grounds that he cannot distinguish virtue from vice at the
very moment when he and the Marchese are discussing plans for the
murder of Ellena, whom they regard as an unworthy object for the
affections of Vivaldi. At which Mrs Radcliffe applies the same
criticism to them:

A philosopher might, perhaps, have been surprised to hear two
persons seriously defining the limits of virtue, at the very
moment in which they meditated the most atrocious crime; a man of
the world would have considered it to be mere hypocrisy; a
supposition which might have disclosed his general knowledge of
manners, but would certainly have betrayed his ignorance of the
human heart.24

Thus, in The ItalianMrs Radcliffe is more
disposed to see evil {63} in the world as connected with faults
in human nature. She still criticises evils and injustices and
is conscious of their social and institutional basis, but there
is notably greater element of pessimism in her work, which
doubtless registers the impact on her of the Reign of Terror in
France. In The
Italian she is highly critical of the injustice,
arbitrariness and antidemocratic mystifications of the
procedures of the religious Inquisition, but it becomes for her
an exemplification not simply of the corruptness of
civilisation, but also of human irrationality:

While meditating upon these horrors, Vivaldi lost every selfish
consideration in astonishment and indignation of the sufferings,
which the frenzied wickedness of man prepares for man, who, even
at the moment of infliction, insults his victim with assertions
of the justice and necessity of such procedure. 'Is this
possible!' said Vivaldi internally, 'Can this be in human
nature! -- Can such horrible perversions of right be permitted!
Can man, who calls himself endowed with reason, and immeasurably
superior to every other created being, argue himself into the
commission of such horrible folly, such inveterate cruelty, as
exceeds all the acts of the most irrational and ferocious
brute? Brutes do not deliberately slaughter their species; it
remains for man only, man, proud of his prerogative of reason,
and boasting of his sense of justice, to unite the most terrible
extremes of folly and wickedness!'25

The Inquisition is itself a form of perversity: it sanctions the
most awful crimes in the name of reason. Instead of assuming that
it is only through culture that man is alienated from nature, the
possibility has to be faced that man himself becomes, or has
become, alienated from the natural. Thus the notion of hypocrisy
as the embodiment of a socially generated false consciousness
begins to acquire an internal dynamic of its own: it opens up the
prospect of perennially false sets of relations -- a hall of
mirrors, of distorting mirrors, from which it is impossible to
escape.

Nevertheless, although influenced by the new mood of
irrationalism, Mrs Radcliffe does remain faithful to her belief
in the goodness of human nature and in the value of {64}
spontaneity. She contrasts the frankness, sincerity, love of
justice and generosity of Vivaldi with Schedoni, who 'saw only
evil in human nature'.26 To see only this evil is to be
guilty of partiality and excessive despondency, to align oneself
with the forces of death against the forces of life. In this
respect Mrs Radcliffe shows herself influenced by the symbolic
language of The Monk. Throughout The Italian she
is conscious of the difference between those who 'render life a
blessing or a burden'27 This also appears as a contrast
between the sacred and the secular, between those, such as
Paulo, who love life and wish to enjoy themselves, and those,
such as Schedoni, whose tortuous spirits prevent them from
living in anything other than a negative and malignant fashion.
In The Italian 'enthusiasm' is seen as the greatest of
all virtues: a generosity of spirit that contrasts with the
meanness and narrowness fostered by the church. The antithesis
appears with great clarity in the dialogue between Vivaldi and
the Abate of the abbey in which Ellena has been confined:

'And can you endure, holy father,' said Vivaldi, 'to witness a
flagrant act of injustice and not endeavour to counteract it? not
even step forward to rescue the victim when you perceive the
preparation for the sacrifice?'

'I repeat, that I never interfere with the authority of others,'
replied the Superior, 'having asserted my own, I yield to them
in their sphere, the obedience which I require in mine.'

'Is power then,' said Vivaldi, 'the infallible test of justice?
Is it morality to obey when the command is criminal? The whole
world have a claim upon the fortitude, the active fortitude of
those who are placed as you are, between the alternative of
confirming a wrong by your consent, or by preventing it by your
resistance. Would that your heart expanded toward that world,
reverend father!'

'Would that the whole world were wrong that you might have the
glory of setting it right!' said the Abate, smiling. 'Young
man! you are an enthusiast, and I pardon you. You are a knight
of chivalry, who would go about the earth fighting with
everybody by way of proving your right to do good; it is
unfortunate that you are born somewhat too late.'

'Enthusiasm is the cause of humanity'- said Vivaldi, but {65} he
checked himself; and despairing of touching a heart so hardened
by selfish prudence, and indignant at beholding an apathy so
vicious in its consequence, he left the Abate without other
effort.'28

The whole discussion is striking in the note it adopts. It is
unexpected to find the arguments rehearsed at the Nuremburg
trials and at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, positions which it is
often assumed are peculiarly modern, occurring in a work such as
this. But it should not really surprise us. The radical tradition
of the times laid great emphasis on the evils of institutions, so
it is only fitting that Mrs
Radcliffe should insist on the importance of combating
injustices that are so strongly and so institutionally entrenched
and argue that in relation to them apathy is just as much an
endorsement of a malignant system as positive complicity.
Oppression figures prominently in the argument of the novel.
Vivaldi sees Ellena as 'oppressed'29 and his own father as a 'haughty
oppressor'30
while Ellena herself regards the Abbess and the other nuns
responsible for her enforced captivity as guilty oppressors.
However, Mrs Radcliffe does qualify her anti-clericalism to some
degree, by presenting in volume iii, chapter 4, a good convent
where no coercion is used, thus providing a positive contrast
with the one shown earlier in the novel. Even so, it does not
significantly shift the frame of reference. For Mrs Radcliffe
argues so strongly for enthusiasm and generosity of spirit that
she even questions the conduct of her heroine: in Ellena's own
eyes she appears as

an unjust and selfish being, unwilling to make any sacrifice for
the tranquility of him, who had given her liberty, even at the
risk of his life. Her very virtues, now that they were carried to
excess, seemed to her to border upon vices; her sense of dignity
appeared to be narrow pride; her delicacy weakness; her moderated
affection cold ingratitude; and her circumspection, a little less
than prudence degenerated into meanness.31

These are the moral faults which the religious life tends to
engender, intensifying them through mystery, intimidation and
coercion. Through the novel Ellena's life is blighted by the
{66} spectre of Schedoni, while Vivaldi is subjected to the
sinister procedures of the Inquisition. The church appears as a
gloomy shadow cast over the secular forms of human life -- which
is dispelled by the fête of the final chapter and Paulo's
cries of 'O! giorno felice!'

In The Italian as in The Mysteries of Udolpho it
is the natural world and the contemplation of scenery that is
marked by sublimity and
grandeur which constitutes a crucial and saving moral resource.
In the first section of the novel Ellena is seized by unknown
ruffians and taken on an obscure and frightening journey, of the
purpose or direction of which she can have little conception,
since she is travelling in a carriage with closed blinds, above
which she can see only 'the towering tops of mountains', 'veiny
precipices' and 'tangled thickets'.32 As they pass through highly
dramatic mountainous scenery the blinds are raised; but Ellena,
far from being oppressed with any sense of terror or of her own
personal helplessness, instead experiences a revival of
confidence and a creative expansion of her own subjectivity.
Her spirits are 'gradually revived and elevated by the grandeur
of the images around her'33 and she says to herself,

If I am condemned to misery surely I could endure it with more
fortitude in scenes like these, than amid the tamer landscapes of
nature! Here, the objects seem to impart somewhat of their own
force, their own sublimity, to the soul. It is scarcely possible
to yield to the pressure of misfortune while we walk, as with the Deity, amidst his most
stupendous work .34

There follows a passage in which the full splendours of the
Radcliffian sublime are unveiled: precipices, torrents, the
setting sun, gloom and darkness are brought together in a thunder
of hyperbole. But the Radcliffian sublime, unlike that of Burke, does not convince the
spectator of his insignificance, but rather has a reassuring and
tranquilizing effect:

It was when the heat and the light were declining that the
carriage entered a rocky defile, which shewed, as through a
telescope reversed, distant plains, and mountains opening beyond,
lighted up with all the purple splendor of the setting sun. Along
this deep and shadowy perspective a river, which {67} was seen
descending among the cliffs of a mountain, rolled with impetuous
force, fretting and foaming amidst the dark rocks in its descent,
and then flowing in a limpid lapse to the brink of other
precipices, whence again it fell with thundering strength to the
abyss, throwing its misty clouds of spray high in the air, and
seeming to claim the whole empire of this solitary wild. Its bed
took up the whole breadth of the chasm, which some strong
convulsion of the earth seemed to have formed, not leaving space
even for a road along its margin. The road, therefore, was
carried high among the cliffs, that impended over the river, and
seemed as if suspended in air; while the gloom and vastness of
the precipices, which towered above and sunk below it, together
with the amazing force and uproar of the falling waters, combined
to render the pass more terrific than the pencil could describe,
or language can express. Ellena ascended it, not with
indifference but with calmness . . . .35

It is through descriptions such as this rather than through Austenian character analysis
that the development of subjectivity is presented: the
progressive revelation to Ellena of herself as a free and
autonomous human being rather than a helpless and abject
dependant. Soon after her confinement -- which is to say,
imprisonment in the convent -- she climbs a flight of winding
stairs to find, at the top, a small turret, which has the most
magnificent view. Looking out of the windows she sees 'a
landscape spread below, whose grandeur awakened all her heart.
The consciousness of her prison was lost, while her eyes ranged
over the wide and freely-sublime scene without.'36 The sublime
thus presents itself as a reminder of the possibility of freedom.
The turret and its discovery become 'an important
circumstance',37 since here Ellena can find the
strength of character that will enable her to endure her
persecutions with fortitude. The contemplation of nature elevates
the mind and softens 'the asperities of affliction'.38 Even in her
darkest hour, when she is under the sinister guardianship of
Spalatro, she overcomes her intense fears in the contemplation of
a sea illuminated by moonlight and is finally able to sleep. For
Ellena, as for Wordsworth, nature is
guardian, guide and nurse.

{68} In contrast with Ellena, the evil characters in the novel
are shown to be unresponsive to nature -- indeed, it is precisely
this fact that serves as a sign of their depravity. Schedoni's
inability to respond to the beauty of nature indicates that he
lacks a capacity for genuine or spontaneous feeling, that he is
too much the narrow rationalist:

Their track now lay through a country less savage, though
scarcely less wild than that they had passed in the morning. It
emerged from the interior toward the border of the forest; they
were no longer enclosed by impending mountains; the withdrawing
shades were no longer impenetrable to the eye, but now and then
opened to gleams of sunshine landscape, and blue distances; and
in the immediate scene, many a green glade spread its bosom to
the sun. The grandeur of the trees, however, did not decline;
the plane, the oak, and the chestnut still threw a pomp of
foliage round these smiling spots, and seemed to consecrate the
mountain streams, that descended beneath their solemn shade.

To the harassed spirits of Ellena the changing scenery was
refreshing, and she frequently yielded her cares to the
influence of majestic nature. Over the gloom of Schedoni, no
scenery had, at any moment, power; the shape and paint of
external imagery gave neither impression or colour to his
fancy. He contemned the sweet illusions, to which other spirits
are liable, and which often confer a delight more exquisite, and
not less innocent, than any which deliberative reason can
bestow.39

Such a description is heavily coded. For Schedoni has raised the
alarming prospect that Ellena may be his daughter, and
consequently any sign that they are temperamentally different may
offer some hope to the reader that Schedoni' s conclusion is
mistaken -- as, indeed, it proves to be. The narrative itself
implies that Ellena's tribulations may be drawing to an end,
since the travellers are no longer enclosed by impenetrable
mountains but are surrounded by scenery characterised by clarity,
transparency and openness. The connection between man and nature
in this scene is not hard to discover. Ellena responds to the
landscape because it is in {69} keeping with her own sunny and
spontaneous disposition; but we should hardly expect Schedoni to
warm to a 'green glade' that spreads its bosom to the sun, since
his own character is gloomy and introverted. His dark past and
his brooding, guilt-ridden nature cut him off from the world of
authentic feeling. This distinction is so important to Mrs Radcliffe that she returns
to it again only a little while later. As they approach Naples,
Ellena weeps as they see the summit of Vesuvius and other
well-known scenes: 'when every mountain of that magnificent
horizon, which enclosed her native landscape, that country which
she believed Vivaldi to inhabit, stood unfolded, how affecting,
how overwhelming were her sensations!'40 But Schedoni, who feels nothing,
becomes prototypical of the consciousness that becomes alienated
from the real world through an obsession with distinctions
constituted through language:

Her expressive countenance disclosed to the Confessor the course
of her thoughts and of her feelings, feelings which, while he
contemned, he believed he perfectly comprehended, but of which,
having never in any degree experienced them, he really understood
nothing. The callous Schedoni, by a mistake not uncommon,
especially to a mind of his character, substituted words for
truths; not only confounding the limits of neighbouring
qualities, but mistaking their very principles.41

The only truthful responses are spontaneous and intuitive; an
excess of ratiocination does not simply lead to error -- it leads
to a total disjuncture between the objective world and the mind
that purportedly contemplates it. Schedoni's blindness to the
beauty of nature is shared by his patroness, the Marquess: the
villa has a splendid view over the bay of Naples, but she is
totally incapable of responding to it: 'her eyes were fixed upon
the prospect without, but her attention was wholly occupied by
the visions that evil passions painted to her imagination'.42 The horror of
the demonic is that it knows only itself. Subjectivity becomes a
prison. Thus, in some sense, the crucial moral distinction in
The Italian becomes the line of demarcation that separates
good from bad subjectivity: one points towards freedom, the other
towards oppression.

The phenomenology of The Italian is significantly
constituted {70} through the imagery of the cloak and of the
veil -- tokens of the way in which relations become obscured and
mystified and of the destructive nature of the intervention of
the church between man, the world and his own nature. The
omnipresent and omnipotent figure of The Italian is that
of a monk muffled in cloak or cowl with no clue as to his
identity, his character or his intentions. If the world becomes
nightmarish and confused, if nothing is what it seems and if no
outlines or lineaments can be discerned, this is because the
church has made it so. The torments suffered by Ellena and
Vivaldi are above all the torments of uncertainty: they endure
not so much physical agonies as the mental anguish of having to
live in a world deprived of clarity, transparency and truth.
Although Ellena, like Antonia, is first presented to the reader
in a veil, its significance is progressively transvalued as it
becomes a marker of oppression and terror. When Ellena is
brought to the convent she refuses to accept the nun's veil. In
the veiling ceremony witnessed by Vivaldi the replacement of a
white veil by a black one signifies a kind of terrifying
oblivion, but Vivaldi, who recognises Ellena in her half-veil,
is able to come to her rescue. The veil initiates Ellena into a
world of treachery and false appearances. Although she is able
to make her escape by actually wearing a nun's veil -- that of
Olivia -- its wearing is laden with menace. She unveils to the
wrong person, while her disguise provides a basis for the charge
against Vivaldi that he has stolen it; as she is seized and
taken away the fainting Vivaldi revives to see her veil floating
away -- the veil is associated not so much with innocence as
with its loss, with an initiation into a world of violence,
corruption and deception. Veil and cowl alike are the signs of
a world that has lost its transparency, where anything can be
anything and where nothing is but what is not.

The most alarming scenes in The Italian are connected
with this feeling of obscurity. There is Ellena's journey in
the carriage with the blinds drawn; her frustration at receiving
a letter from Vivaldi in circumstances where it is so dark that
she finds it impossible to read it; the fact that Vivaldi,
before the Inquisition, is unable to identify those who accuse
him. Mrs Radcliffe's stylistic method is well represented by
the following description of the room in which the
inquisitionary proceedings are held:

{71} Round the table were several unoccupied chairs, on the back
of which appeared figurative signs, at the upper end of the
apartment, a gigantic crucifix stretched nearly to the vaulted
roof; at the lower end, suspended from an arch in the wall, was a
dark curtain, but whether it veiled a window or shrouded some
object or person, necessary to the designs of the Inquisitor,
there was little means of judging. It was, however, suspended
from an arch such as sometimes contains a casement, or leads to a
deep recess.43

We are presented with intangibles, with gaps in the world waiting
to be filled. The chairs are unoccupied, the signs are enigmatic,
the purposes of the Inquisitor obscure. The description focuses
on a 'dark curtain', but this itself only leads to vague
speculation and the proliferation of imponderables. The torment
of the Inquisition is seen not so much in terms of torture as in
terms of epistemological uncertainty. The quintessential symbol
of the whole work is the bloody garment of a monk, 'vest and
scapulary rent and stained with blood',44 which Vivaldi discovers in the
vault. The explanation of how it came to be there is eventually
provided, but the garment conveys its own indisputable message:
the association of the church with intrigue and mysterious
violence. Although a mystery, it simultaneously supplies its own
solution to the riddle of the novel -- suggesting as it does the
guilt of Schedoni, though in reality the result of the wounding
of Nicola di Zampari by Paulo, Vivaldi's servant.

The greatest mystery in the novel is connected with the
character of Schedoni. Schedoni is an absent presence: he does
not directly appear in large sections of the narrative, but he
nevertheless figures as the point of imaginative focus for the
reader. His gigantic stature, his apparent omnipresence and
omniscience, his formidable memory, which permits him to
memorise down to the last detail an official document of the
Inquisition -- all this suggests the Superman. But Schedoni is
also imposing because he represents the complex, multifarious
personality, as contrasted with the simple, unambiguous
personality of Ellena and Vivaldi. Everything connected with
Schedoni raises problems of identity. Is he identical with the
cowled figure who warns Vivaldi not to go to the villa Altieri?
Is he the same person whose agonising symptoms of guilt and {72}
remorse created a stir at the confessional of the Black
Penitents? Is he Ellena's father? Is he Ferrando, Count di
Bruno, and was Ferrando also the man who confessed? Schedoni
has a multiplicity of doubles. His assumed
identity as Schedoni makes him his own double, but there is also
Spalatro, his evil minion, and Nicola di Zampari, who is many
times confused with him. The difficulty of making all these
connections, of ever really establishing anything for certain,
is precisely what constitutes the nightmare of a world deprived
of transparency. To nail Schedoni down is extremely difficult,
since he can be proved guilty only if all the identities can be
clarified. A multiplicity of evidence is required: from Nicola
di Zampari, from Father Ansaldo, to whom he confessed, from
Beatrice, Olivia, the old peasant who found a dead body in a
sack and also from Spalatro. The mystery element in The
Italian actually has far more substance than The
Mysteries of Udolpho, since Udolpho simply confronts us with
one or two puzzles and shocks, while The Italian is an
intricately constructed detective story, whose denouement has
great moral force: the labyrinths which Schedoni has constructed
are symptomatic of his own tortuous and alienated subjectivity
-- evidence of the heavy price to be paid when man deserts the
spontaneous and the natural.

Nevertheless, Schedoni is not altogether without redeeming
features -- for the Romantic mind the hypocrite
must always be a figure of compassion, as well as an object of
moral censure. Schedoni, though lost in the labyrinthine
workings of his own mind, is not altogether bereft of the
redeeming power of sympathy. And the reader himself must
sympathise a little with Schedoni, if only because he may be
under the delusion that Schedoni really is Ellena's father.
Although he frequently teeters on the brink of evil, the
Schedoni who is actually present in the novel is rarely able to
bring himself to commit it: at the last moment he fails to
murder Ellena and the knife falls from his hand; in response to
Ellena's pleading he spares the life of Spalatro. But Schedoni
must be condemned because for him there is no path leading back
to humanity: his actions have cut him off irrevocably from the
world of the human for the Romantics the most terrible
punishment of all. Schedoni may be superhuman, but he is also
less than human. By implication Mrs Radcliffe is also making a
statement about {73} authenticity: the novel suggests that once
you have lost it there can be no going back. This also reflects
intriguingly on Schedoni's indecisiveness at critical moments: a
man possessed by bad faith, he lacks any genuine basis for
action.

The figure of Schedoni, when taken in conjunction with the
thematic doubling of the theme of oppression, through the
alternation of the narrative from Ellena to Vivaldi, creates a
richer and more complex novel than The Mysteries of
Udolpho. It is structurally polycentric and allows us to
see events from a number of different points of view.
Nevertheless, it may be objected that Mrs Radcliffe draws back from
the more interesting implications of her subject, by first
raising the possibility that Schedoni may be Ellena's father,
only subsequently to discount it in a manner that appears
anticlimactic. However, this is to ignore the obvious but
important point that The Italian is a novel written by a
woman. The mysterious omnipotence of Schedoni signifies the
fact that woman lives in a world of masculine domination and her
attempts to develop her identity and personality are thwarted at
every turn. In Ellena's struggle towards self- realisation, it
is Schedoni who stands there blocking the path and impeding her
progress at every step of the way. It is therefore
indispensable that Schedoni, like Montoni in Udolpho, be
stripped of the appearance of grandeur. The full significance
of the attempted murder of Ellena by Schedoni is that,
symbolically, it is an attempted rape, a violation of the last
vestige of her independence. But his inability to go through
with it produces a reversal of roles: now it is Ellena who is
dominant, Schedoni who is abject. But Schedoni's claim to the
paternity of Ellena must be repudiated by Mrs Radcliffe not
simply because he is the kind of man he is, but also because a
validation of it would also be a symbolic validation of male
dominance and omnipotence. Ellena has lost not only a father
but also a mother, and Mrs Radcliffe quite consciously stresses
the importance of this relationship in the closing pages of the
narrative:

Ellena no longer returned her caresses; surprise and doubt
suspended every tender emotion; she gazed upon Olivia with an
intensity that partook of wildness. At length she said slowly --
'It is my mother, then, whom I see! When will these discoveries
end!'

The nun endeavoured to soothe the agitated spirits of Ellena,
though she was herself nearly overwhelmed by the various and
acute feelings this disclosure occasioned. For a considerable
time they were unable to speak but in short sentences of
affectionate exclamation, but joy was evidently a more
predominant feeling with the parent than with the child. When,
however, Ellena could weep, she became more tranquil, and by
degrees was sensible of a degree of happiness such as she had
perhaps never experienced.45

The significance of the mother-daughter relationship in the novel
is not that a daughter necessarily feels more affection for a
mother than for a father, but primarily that a mother is
supportive of the feminine role; she can provide a strong and
clear sense of what it is to be a woman. We may remember that in
Udolpho it is through a false mother-figure that Emily is
delivered into the hands of Montoni. In The Italian the
discovery of her mother makes her marriage to Vivaldi possible:

Then, irresolute, desolate, surrounded by strangers, and ensnared
by enemies, she had believed she saw Vivaldi for the last time;
now, supported by the presence of a beloved parent, and by the
willing approbation of the person, who had so strenuously opposed
her, they were met to part no more!46

In a very real sense Ellena's task in The Italian is to
lose a father and find a mother.

The other important reworking of the thematic materials of
The Monk, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Die Elixiere des
Teufels, appears in quite a different cultural context and
considerably later: the Germany of 1816. This context is
in all respects highly significant. The defeat of Napoleon and the re-
establishment of 'order' in Germany indicates a reactionary
political climate very far from the context of earlier Gothic. Hoffmann himself
embodied the contradictions of bourgeois culture in an acute
form. Though a Kunstler in multifarious guises, a
writer, musician and theatrical producer, he had nevertheless,
in {75} 1814,
abandoned these occupations as a means of financial support in
order to become a deputy judge in Berlin. The preoccupation
with a splitting of the ego in Die Elixiere des Teufels
bears a clear relationship to his own personal experience as a
man split between contradictory roles, even though there is an
unmistakable provenance for such a concern in the literature of
the Gothic itself. The elements of social criticism in Hoffmann
are even more subterranean than they are in Lewis, though they
are undoubtedly there. In Die Elixiere des Teufels
Hoffmann makes an ironic focus of the novel the discrepancy
between his occupation and his passion when he has Medardus, the
monk, answer the question as to why he withheld certain
information from the judge by saying, 'How could I expect him to
attach any importance to a story which could only have sounded
fantastic to him? Is an enlightened court of justice allowed to
believe in the miraculous?'47 -- but this only has the force of
implying that the individual and the social are
incommensurable. Hoffmann deflects attention from the
individual's conflict with society, yet even here the falsity of
the social world is apparent.

Die Elixiere des Teufels not only self-consciously
alludes to Lewis's The
Monk, rendering transparent its own character as an
over-determined fiction, but also picks up many of its motifs.
Medardus's love for Aurelia repeats Ambrosio's love for Antonia,
but it is intensified by the fact that Hoffmann transposes the
motif of the picture to her, thus making his love for her more
ideal. In The Monk it was Matilda who bore a resemblance
to the Madonna and thus caused Ambrosio to fall away from the
ascetic ideal. Antonia's attraction for him is primarily
erotic. Hoffmann more deliberately restructures the fable in
terms of a contradiction between sacred and profane love.
Francesca the painter who figures in one of the interpolated
narratives, intends to transform a sacred representation of
Saint Rosalia into a secular one, by portraying her in the nude,
as Venus. However, in the process of composition he
mysteriously finds himself reverting towards the original
spiritual conception, but is unable to complete the face. Only
under the influence of the devil's elixirs can he supply the
face -- that of a Venus whose glance is filled with voluptuous
passion. This constant slippage between the erotic and the
ideal becomes the novel's obsessive theme. It is, {76}
moreover, connected with the thematic of love and death.
Hoffmann introduces the second part of the narrative by saying,
'the supreme rapture of love, the fulfilment of the miracle, is
manifested in death'.48, Medardus dies exactly one year
after Aurelia/Rosalia, to the day and hour, symbolically
indicating that they can be 'united in death as they never could
be in life. Die Elixiere des Teufels postdates Goethe's Faust Part I (1808) and can be seen
as a reworking of The Monk in corresponding terms.
Medardus, like Faust, is torn between a spiritual restlessness
and a desire for peace, a man caught up in the dynamics of a
quest that offers no finality no matter how much he may long for
it. In Hoffmann the quest has its own peculiar tortuousness,
since Aurelia is simultaneously an ideal he longs for and yet
something he unconsciously desires to deface. Medardus's
constant switching between the codes of sacred and profane love
produces in him only agony and torment -- guilt, frustration and
resentment.

Die Elixiere is unquestionably the most intricate
treatment of the problem of identity to be found in Romantic literature. In Lewis the hypocritical monk
exemplified a contradiction between a false social appearance
and an immoral but authentic deeper self. But for Hoffmann the
notion of hypocrisy points to a situation of non-correspondence
in which identity is always slipping away from and eluding the
forms in which it manifests itself. For Hoffmann, unlike many
of his contemporaries, the idea of sincerity is virtually an
impossibility, for it predicates a correspondence between inner
and outer that could never be validated, since the 'inner' is
always escaping inspection, fixity or capture. Medardus
fractures into a variety of identities: he is Franz(iscus),
Medardus, his double Medardus, Victor, Herr Leonard Crczynski,
and he is more than one of these at the same time. The
ontological status of these identities of the visions and
hallucinations they experience becomes confusingly blurred.
Medardus destroys one part and replaces it with another -- in
the hands of Pietro Belcampo (himself split as Belcampo/
Schönfeld) he abolishes his monkish persona -- he has his
hair cut differently, wears fashionable clothes and adopts new
ways of walking and of holding his body and arms.

The discontinuities in the narrative and the articulation of the
narrative structure through a series of complex parallelisms
{77} rather than through a purely linear progression reinforce
this sense of fracturing. Even the distinction between internal
and external disappears, since Medardus is unable to recognise
as 'his' certain actions that he performs, yet at the same time
is forced to acknowledge that his doubles really are him. 'I
recognised myself" is his response to the Medardus figure who
torments him in prison; yet when he runs away after the killing
of Hermogenes he scarcely recognises himself when he sees his
own image reflected in the stream. In playing two parts at the
palace of the Baron -- as Victor, the lover of Euphemia, and
Medardus, the lover of Aurelia -- he loses all sense of who he
really is: 'I am what I seem to be, yet do not seem to be what I
am; even to myself I am an insoluble riddle, for my personality
has been torn apart.'50 The self paradoxically recognises
itself only in the act of cognition that there is no central or
stable self to be identified. In this way Medardus is truly a
hallucination and not even a person who has hallucinations: 'I
was the disembodied spirit of my personality, appearing as a red
glow in the sky.'51 The alarming aspect of Medardus's
situation is that the very idea of an inner voice becomes
problematic. There is simply endless mental turmoil and
conflict that has no focus or resolution:

Tossed to and fro in this cruel conflict, I could see no escape
from the ruin that faced me on all sides. Gone was that mood of
exaltation which made my whole life seem like a dream; I saw
myself as a murderer and a common libertine. All that I had told
the judge and the physician was nothing but foolish, clumsy lies:
there had been no inner voice speaking to me, as I had tried to
persuade myself.52

Medardus in so far as he can be defined is described by a series
of involuntary actions: either those ascribed to the Medardus
double or those which he carries out himself. He fails to stab
himself, to stab Aurelia -- he saves his own life by
instinctively pouring a corrosive drink he has been given into
his sleeve. The stabbing of Hermogenes is just something that
occurs in their struggle without any attribution of
intentionality. So these actions do not 'belong' to Medardus in
any obvious sense; they are simply things which he does but which
in no {78} way serve to characterise him as a person. Medardus
himself is an enigma -- in fact, even to call him 'Medardus'
seems questionable, since this is to give ontological priority to
what is only one of his many roles. The only real basis of his
identity is the love of Aurelia: if he is anyone he is the person
who loves Aurelia. Yet even this can be threatened: 'A sense of
apathy crept over me; I became indifferent to everything, and
even the vision of Aurelia faded.'53 But at crucial moments it is the
name and thought of Aurelia that sustain him. This love,
endlessly crisscrossing between the sacred and profane, is the
only thing that threads together a multiplicity of identities and
perceptions. Desire is the only and irreducible ground of
being.

The disintegration of personality implies that man is
necessarily subject to the inscrutable operations of fate --
for, as Peter Schönfeld ironically asks, with a question
whose implications resonate through the novel, '"What is
direction, reverent Capuchin?" he said softly, still with that
bitter-sweet smile on his lips. "Direction presupposes a goal
from which we take our bearings."'54 Medardus is marked at an early age
by the red wound which he receives on the neck from the abbess's
diamond crucifix. This mark designates his symmetry with his
own double: that is to say, it shows fate, not identity, as the
principle that constructs and organises. This wound, like
Medardus's loss of his arm through corrosive poison, seems
symbolically associated with the stigma of eros: the
abbess is Medardus's first love and she indicates the necessary
connection between love and pain -- 'I have hurt you, but we
shall still become good friends.'55

The narrative of Die Elixiere des Teufels demonstrates
through its connections, repetitions and parallels that the
miraculous is not dead in the world and that man's destiny is in
the power of strange, mysterious but ultimately beneficent
forces. Implicitly Hoffmann's providence is an artist, a
Kunstler like the writer himself. Medardus's destiny is
watched over by two artist figures, Belcampo/Schonfeld and the
mysterious painter from Linden with his red cloak -- a figure
clearly derived from the self-portrait of Salvator Rosa, another
of Hoffmann's heroes. In a curious way, Medardus believes that
he is not responsible for what he does: 'More and more I became
convinced that an inscrutable destiny had knit {79} together my
fate and hers, and that what had sometimes appeared to be as a
sinful crime was only the fulfilment of an irrevocable
decree.'56
Every action includes within it the possibility of its own
transcendence: the committing of a crime makes possible the
process of spiritual redemption, a profane love for Aurelia can
be transvalued into a love that is purer and more spiritual.
Thus, despite discontinuity, Hoffmann does postulate a principle
of internal dynamism whereby man is always capable of going
beyond whatever he is, or may have been.

The intersection between the concerns of Faust and those of Gothic is equally strongly
represented by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern
Prometheus, published two years later, in 1818. The narrative
articulation of Frankenstein is remarkably incisive:
Frankenstein is simultaneously a scientist-artist figure who
goes beyond what is either lawful or possible, a Gothic
'hypocrite' in the tradition of Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, and at the same
time a fable of the irrational, a demonstration of how reason
itself produces the uncontrolled, unpredictable and
involuntary.

Not the least interesting aspect of Frankenstein is that he
appears to the reader as a somnambulist: a man who is
mysteriously led in a particular direction by forces that seem
to override his conscious control, despite the fact that he is,
at the same time, a hero of reason, a man whose phenomenal
lucidity and insight enable him to solve the mystery of life
itself. The path that leads Frankenstein to create his monster
is one delineated not so much by conscious intention as by
chance circumstances, mysterious impulses, switches of mood and
unforeseen conjunctions. At one moment Frankenstein is prompted
to give up the study of natural philosophy, which has exercised
a deep fascination on him, for the study of mathematics: 'All
that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable.
By one of those caprices of the mind, which we are perhaps most
subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former
occupations.'57 This prompts the reflection,
'Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight
ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin'58 which is
confirmed by the fact that this change of heart is itself only
temporary: 'It was a strong effort of the spirit of good; but it
was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her {80} immutable
laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.'59

Henceforward Frankenstein's progress is strongly marked by a
spirit of perversity. As he listens to his chemistry professor
at Ingoldstadt, Mr Waldman,
drawing a sharp distinction between modern science, which in his
view aims low but delivers a great deal, and ancient alchemists, who promised
impossibilities and performed nothing',60 he feels forming within himself a
response of contradiction: 'As he went on, I felt as if my soul
were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various
keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being: chord
after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one
thought, one conception, one purpose.'61 Frankenstein's project of
unfolding to the world 'the deepest mysteries of creation'62 in a way
that will reflect the noble ambitions of the ancients is
generated not in pure lucidity but out of an internal unrest
that leaves him with an intention but with no real understanding
as to how it was arrived at:

I closed not my eyes that night. My internal being was in a state
of insurrection and turmoil; I felt that order would thence
arise, but I had no power to produce it. By degrees, after the
morning's dawn, sleep came. I awoke, and my yesternight's
thoughts were as a dream. There only remained a resolution to
return to my ancient studies, and to devote myself to a science
for which I believed myself to possess a natural talent.63

As Frankenstein becomes more and more deeply engrossed in his
mysterious purpose he appears possessed, he begins to lose all
consciousness of himself as a person:

One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I
dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours,
through which, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued
nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my
secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the
grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless
clay? My limbs now tremble and my eyes swim with the remembrance;
but then a {81} resistless, and almost frantic impulse urged me
forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this
one pursuit.64

The notion of torturing the living in order to animate the dead
has a particular pertinence to Frankenstein himself: he has
become physically emaciated and emotionally numb from his
researches; after creating the monster, he lives on shattered and
overcome by such a deep sense of his own wretchedness, what is
virtually a sickness unto death, that it is as if the life that
has gone into the monster has passed out of Frankenstein. The
monster embodies the truth of Frankenstein: a will to creation
that is in reality destructive, a rationality deeply contaminated
by the irrational, a secret spirit of negativity:

I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed
with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the
deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own
vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to
destroy all that was dear to me.65

The monster is separated from Frankenstein by a double
involuntariness: Frankenstein neither intended the monster to be
like that nor to have the consequences which his being
like that generates, but this brings us back to the paradox that
Frankenstein himself did not intend anything -- he produced his
monster out of causes unknown to himself. The real meaning of the
monster is that of a suicide, the destruction of Frankenstein as
a human being. Frankenstein notes that Mr Waldman places before
him the instruments 'which were to be afterwards used in putting
me to a slow and cruel death'66: his death at the hands of the
monster is a further multiplication of the involuntary -- an act
of self-destruction which he did not intend, but nevertheless
produced. The popular confusion by which the appellation
'Frankenstein' can be applied as readily to the monster as to the
creator embodies a significant truth: the monster is
Frankenstein's double and
is just as much entitled to the name; the inception and being of
the monster are indissolubly linked.

The creation of the monster initiates a double severance {82}
between Frankenstein and the world. Frankenstein's unlawful
scientific researches place a barrier between him and ordinary
humanity. At the same time, by his involvement in activities
which cannot be revealed to any other person, Frankenstein
places himself in the position of the Godwinian hypocrite -- a man
who because of a secret that he keeps buried within creates a
discrepancy between inner and outer that becomes a source of
torment to him and cuts him off from family, friends and the
pleasures of human society. Mary Shelley emphasises that the
separation between Frankenstein and his family occurs even
before the birth of the monster. He fails to write to his
father and forgets all about his friends and those close to
him. His father writes that, if this study 'has a tendency to
weaken your affections', it is 'certainly unlawful'.67
Nevertheless, Frankenstein's situation after the death of his
brother William and his return to the family is infinitely more
painful, for his genuine concern is negated and rendered
inauthentic by his recognition that he himself is the true
murderer and by the fact that he cannot disclose the secret of
his involvement: 'Anguish and despair had penetrated the core
of my heart; I bore a hell within me that nothing could
extinguish.'68

In this way, the death of Justine becomes Frankenstein's
greatest crime: for from the other deaths he can be partially
exonerated, but Justine, who is falsely accused, tried and
condemned to death for a crime that she did not commit, pays the
price wholly because of his bad faith. Frankenstein becomes an
allegory of the origin of evil: an inquiry in the tradition of
Shaftesbury and Godwin as to how destructive
consequences can follow from benevolent intentions. Both
Frankenstein and his creation are basically benevolent and
filled with good intentions, but these become dislocated and
diverted from their proper course. After the death of Justine,
Frankenstein is unable to face the world and human society; he
is consigned to the living death of solitude:

Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than, after the
feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events,
the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and
deprives the soul both of hope and fear. Justine died; she
rested; and I was alive. The blood flowed freely in my veins,
but a weight of despair and remorse pressed on {83} my heart,
which nothing could remove. Sleep fled from my eyes; I wandered
like an evil spirit, for I had committed deeds of mischief
beyond description horrible, and more, much more (I persuaded
myself), was yet behind. Yet my heart overflowed with kindness,
and the love of virtue. I had begun life with benevolent
intentions, and thirsted for the moment when I should put them
into practice and make myself useful to my fellow-human beings.
Now all was blasted: instead of that of serenity of conscience,
which allowed me to look back upon the past with
self-satisfaction, and from thence to gather promise of new
hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which
hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures, such as no
language can describe. This state of mind preyed upon my
health, which had perhaps never entirely recovered from the
first shock it had sustained. I shunned the face of man; all
sound of joy of complacency was torture to me; solitude was my
only consolation -- deep, dark, deathlike solitude.69

Frankenstein's torments are directly caused by his
inability to confess, but at the same time the split
Frankenstein/monster and the mysterious process by which the one
generates the other becomes an obscure allegory of the way in
which the benevolent can produce the perverse. Thus, in some
sense Frankenstein becomes an 'explanation' of what cannot
really be explained.

The monster duplicates the spiritual alienation of Frankenstein but
in an inverted form. The inner-outer discrepancy with
Frankenstein manifests itself as an awareness that he is not
what he appears to be, that he is in fact the monster. Yet,
though his ugly, physically revolting exterior cuts himself off
from the possibility of any kind of relationship -- even with
Frankenstein himself, who has confided to his diary his feelings
of repulsion -- behind this carapace there lies a genuine
sensitivity. The monster is shown to be more sensitive and more
genuine in his responses than Frankenstein himself: we
sympathise with his indignation when he exclaims in outrage,
'Unfeeling heartless creator! You had endowed me with
perceptions and passions, and then cast me abroad an object for
the scorn and horror of mankind.'70 Even Frankenstein concedes that
his creation is 'a creature of fine {84} sensations'71 -- but these
feelings, lacking any proper outlet, can only be discharged in
anger, resentment and violence. In different ways both
Frankenstein and the monster are instances of a ruined and
wrecked humanity: excluded from full humanity both by the fact
that they are cut off from normal intercourse and society and by
the flaw that makes them both discrepant, the one internal, the
other external. Frankenstein characterises himself as 'a
blasted tree': 'The bolt has entered into my soul; and I felt
then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease
to be -- a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to
others, and intolerable to myself.'72 Thus the relationship which
Frankenstein bears to himself closely parallels the feelings of
his creature, who is similarly alienated both from humanity and
from his own self. What Frankenstein and the monster both have
in common is 'sensibility'. Just prior to their fateful
encounter in the sublime
surroundings of Mont Blanc,
Frankenstein asks,

Alas! why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those
apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary
beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and
desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every
wind that blows, and a chance word or scene that that word may
convey to us.73

This formulation comes closest to unravelling the
enigma propounded by the novel. Frankenstein, in a milieu that
should fill him with feelings of exhilaration and self-
confidence, feels only melancholy and doubt: man's capacity for
feeling, the more complex nature of his passions and desires
render his freedom problematic and cut him off from the
possibility of happiness. He lacks for his desires an adequate
object: the monster is not adequate for Frankenstein, the
monster himself feels a lack that Frankenstein cannot supply.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel is that it
ends not with Frankenstein contemplating the death of his
monster, but with the monster's thoughts and feelings after he
has murdered his creator. This focuses the reader's attention
on the problem of transcendence. The monster has been created
as a flawed and isolated thing, potentially capable of
happiness, {85} but objectively cut off from it by the
circumstances of his creation. His noble impulses are
distorted, he is punished for his good intentions. The self-
consciousness of Frankenstein's monster must be insisted upon:
he grasps more fully the conditions of his existence, of his
freedom and unfreedom, than does Frankenstein, the spiritual
somnambulist. In Frankenstein's monster the ghost of the
superhuman that haunted the Gothic in Radcliffe, Lewis and Hoffmann becomes a
palpable thematic presence. The monster takes on himself the
knowledge of good and evil, the consciousness of a decadent and
sinful world as well as of his own sin. He lies beyond the
world of human justice and can only judge himself: his death
thus has an existential grandeur and significance that was
wholly lacking at the moment of his inception. The monster is
thus the true hero of Frankenstein.

The preoccupation with the Superman, so evident in
Frankenstein, is equally conspicuous in Charles Maturin's
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a novel which is
inheritor of the whole tradition of Gothic, and at the same time
the definitive statement of later Romanticism. Apart from the
notable advocacy of Baudelaire, Maturin is a writer who has
never received the recognition that he deserves. His fiction
violates so many of the canons, tacit, unacknowledged or overt,
by which literature is so often judged. Maturin's great novel
Melmoth lacks any simple or unified plot but appears
rather as a spinning globe suddenly arrested by the malignant
author to disclose scenes frightening, grotesque,
phantasmagorical. The novel appears as totally and hopelessly
fragmented as the many indistinct manuscripts invoked by Maturin
to shed partial light on the exploits of his extraordinary
hero. One fragment is cut into another. The young Melmoth on
the death of his uncle is presented with the reminiscences of an
English traveller named Stanton, filled with hiatuses in the
most alarming places, a document which itself seems to represent
the bafflement of man before the inconclusiveness of the world
-- 'The manuscript was discoloured, obliterated, and mutilated
beyond any that had ever before exercised the patience of a
reader'74 --
and its tendency is not to clarify but to frustrate: 'He could
but just make out what tended rather to excite than assuage that
feverish thirst of curiosity which was consuming his inmost
soul.'75Melmoth the Wanderer is a vast {86} game played by
Maturin on the reader in which the reader's very desire for a
conclusion, for a terminus that will seem to justify the whole
enterprise of embarking on it in the first place, is parodied
and mocked.

In experiencing a multiplicity of torments, disappointments and
frustrations -- the agonies of Stanton in the madhouse, the
torments of Monçada at the hands of the Spanish church
and the Inquisition, the education of the beautiful and innocent
Immalee into the repressions and perversities of civilised life,
the cruel sufferings and starvation of Walberg and his family,
the betrayal of Elinor by her lover -- the reader is
paradoxically forced into the position of Melmoth himself, into
taking up the stance of the cynical and world-weary observer,
who can see in all this human misery no conceivable purpose.
The lesson of the novel is that there is no such thing as an
ending, let alone a happy ending -- when Maturin supplies his
readers with a positive conclusion, it is one from which no
comfort can be derived. Walberg and his family, heirs of the
wealthy Spaniard Guzman, find themselves disinherited through
the machinations of the church. They are reduced to the utmost
penury, in which Walberg actually contemplates the murder of his
own family but is saved from the drastic consequences of his own
intentions by his own delirious and near insane condition. At
this point a priest arrives to tell them that the true will of
Guzman has been found. But no reversal of fortune can expunge
the memory of the horrors which they have experienced. In
writing in this fashion, Maturin appears as a dishevelled and
importunate intruder on the tranquillity of the reader, as
uncouth and unwelcome as Coleridge's Ancient Mariner to the
wedding guest. For the reader is unlikely to have forgotten
Maturin's initial statement that the stories of Elinor and of
Walberg are founded on fact, not his own concluding avowal:

I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a
character as that of a writer of romances, without regretting
the necessity that compels me to it. Did my profession furnish
me with the means of subsistence, I should hold myself culpable
indeed in having recourse to any other, but -- am I allowed the
choice?71

The contract between author and reader is one sealed not in {87}
the concord of the imagination but in blood, money, sweat and
tears. Maturin is too close to his own work and the sentiments
it expresses to be either a convincing embodiment of aesthetic
transcendence or, indeed, of clerical sanctimoniousness. So
with this confession he destroys two reputations at once.

With Melmoth the Wanderer we are forcibly reminded of the
essential duplicity of the Gothic after Lewis. The genre permits the
expression of subversive attitudes behind a more or less
transparent veil of sententious moralising. Maturin's novel
purports to be an exposé of the iniquities of
Catholicism, which indeed it is. But, since Catholicism appears
also as symbolic of the generally destructive and demoralising
role which religion plays in human affairs -- strong stuff
indeed from an Irish clergyman -- no wonder Baudelaire respected
'la grande création satanique du reverend Maturin'.77 Maturin's
strongest criticism of the church appears in 'The Tale of the
Spaniard', Monçada. Its role is to subvert, warp and
distort every normal human feeling: it sets Monçada at
odds both with his father and mother and also with his brother,
distorting their relations for religious ends. Spontaneity and
genuineness are destroyed and in their place are set hypocrisy,
self-seeking and manipulation. 'The virtues of nature are
always deemed vices in a convent',78, writes Maturin on behalf of his
protagonist Monçada, who is led to reflect 'with
increasing horror on a system that forced hypocracy to a
precocity unparalleled, and made the last vice of life the
earliest of conventual youth'.79 The monastic system, like all
systems of 'civilised' behaviour, is one based on coercion,
intimidation and fear. The statement of Monçada's
brother that 'The basis of all ecclesiastical power rests upon
fear'80
brings out the fact that 'The Tale of the Spaniard' is intended
by Maturin to be in careful contrast with 'The Tale of the
Indians', since Immalee on her island in the Pacific 'could not
be conscious of fear, for nothing of that world in which she
lived had ever borne a hostile appearance to her'.81 By contrast,
Monçada is subject to the most unyielding and implacable
compulsion:

I returned to the convent -- I felt my destiny was fixed -- I had
no wish to avert or arrest it -- I was like one who sees an
enormous engine (whose operation is to crush him to {88} atoms)
put in motion, and, stupefied with horror, gazes on it with a
calmness that might be mistaken for that of one who was coolly
analysing the complication of its machinery, and calculating the
resistless crush of its blow.82

The consequence of his initiation into the church
is catastrophic -- it leads to a virtual extinction of the
processes of consciousness:

Day followed day for many a month, of which I have no
recollection, nor wish to have any. I must have experienced many
emotions, but they all subsided like the waves of the sea under
the darkness of a midnight sky -- their fluctuation continues,
but there is no light to mark their motion, or trace when they
rise and fall. A deep stupor pervaded my senses and soul; and
perhaps in this state, I was best fitted for the monotonous
existence to which I was doomed. It is certain that I performed
all the conventual functions with a regularity that left nothing
to be blamed, and an apathy that left nothing for praise. My life
was a sea without a tide. The bell did not toll for service with
more mechanical punctuality than I obeyed the summons. No
automaton, constructed on the most exquisite principles of mechanism, and obeying those
principles with a punctuality almost miraculous, could leave the
artist less room for complaint or disappointment, than I did the
superior and community.83

In these descriptions we find Maturin invoking states of feeling
that are simultaneously states of non-feeling, a disturbing
absence of voluntary mental or emotional processes. The full
nightmare of 'L'homme machine' is realised. These are
characteristic moments in Maturin's work: his protagonists are so
shocked, stunned and traumatised by the shocks which life gives
them that they lack any capacity to respond adequately. Their
emotional disorientation leads to insanity, derangement and
madness. They lose touch with the normal world of human feeling.
This once again feeds back into a critique of the Catholic Church
and of religious institutions in general. Maturin refers to 'the
sterility of human nature in a convent'84 , and Monçada's reflections,
when he has escaped from the power of the Inquisition, are
strongly impregnated with the atmosphere of Caleb Williams
and with the Godwinian
philosophy of human sympathy:

Many days elapsed, indeed, before the Jew began to feel his
immunity somewhat dearly purchased by the additional maintenance
of a troublesome and, I fear, deranged inmate. He took the first
opportunity that the recovery of my intellect offered, of hinting
this to me, and inquired mildly what I purposed to do, and where
I meant to go. This question for the first time opened to my view
that range of hopeless and interminable desolation that lay
before me -- the Inquisition had laid waste the whole track of
life, as with fire and sword. I had not a spot to stand on, a
meal to earn, a hand to grasp, a voice to greet, a roof to crouch
under, in the whole realm of Spain.

You are not to learn, Sir, that the power of the Inquisition,
like that of death, separates you, by its single touch, from all
mortal relations. From the moment its grasp has seized you, all
human hands unlock their hold of yours you have no longer
father, mother, sister, or child. . . . Absolute
famine stared me in the face, and a sense of degradation
accompanied by consciousness of my own utter and desolate
helplessness, was the keenest shaft in the quiver, whose
contents were lodged in my heart. My consequence was actually
lessened in my own eyes, by ceasing to become the victim of
persecution, by which I had suffered so long. While people
think it worth their while to torment us, we are never without
some dignity, though painful and imaginary. Even in the
Inquisition I belonged to somebody, -- I was watched and
guarded; now, I was the outcast of the whole earth, and I wept
with equal bitterness and depression at the hopeless vastness of
the desert I had to traverse.85

It is society that provides the individual with his raison
d'etre, and, when he is cut off from it, this is equivalent
to ceasing to exist. It is far from irrelevant to observe that
this is also the predicament of an artist such as Maturin: fated
no longer to be feared or reviled -- even by a Coleridge -- but
to be ignored.

With the 'Tale of the Indians' the philosophical base of
Melmoth the Wanderer is expanded. It becomes clear that
{90} Catholicism is merely the type of the misery which religion
inflicts on mankind and that, in turn, it is this form of
oppression which is normally known as 'civilisation'. The
telescope which Melmoth hands to Immalee shows humans being
sacrificed to the Juggernaut, and discloses to her
simultaneously human life as a world of religion and a world of
suffering. The whole episode can be seen as an ironic parody of
the vision of the future history of the world disclosed to Adam in Milton's Paradise Lost, since what
for Milton was part of a providential design is seen by Maturin
as a process of destruction and futility inaugurated by religion
itself. Thus, Maturin's identification of Melmoth with Satan at this point has a good
deal of force -- for to oppose such a design tends to put both
Melmoth and Satan in the right. Melmoth observes,

'It is right,' he continued, not only to have thoughts of this
Being, but to express them by some outward acts. The
inhabitants of the world you are about to see, call this worship
-- and they have adopted (a Satanic smile curled his lip as he
spoke) very different modes; so different, that in fact, there
is but one point in which they all agree -- that of making their
religion a torment; the religion of some prompting them to
torture themselves, and the religion of some prompting them to
torture others. Though, as I observed, they all agree in this
important point, yet unhappily they differ so much about the
mode, that there has been much disturbance about it in the world
that thinks.86

Maturin encourages the reader to associate himself with
Immalee's reaction of shock and horror; but the reader can
scarcely evade the fact that the place from which Immalee can do
this is, in fact, no place, a place that exists only
hypothetically, like Romantic literature
itself. The very island where Immalee lives has been invaded by
Indians, who are intent on seeing her as a 'goddess'.87 Immalee
responds to the sight of the destruction before the Juggernaut
by invoking the Romantic insistence on feeling: 'The world that
thinks does not feel. I never saw the rose kill the bud.'88 For Maturin
religion is to be seen not as an alien deformation of the world
of civilisation but as the most characteristic manifestation of
it, {91} a warping, wrenching, perverting and dislocating of
human feeling. Madness in a very real sense embodies the truth
of civilisation: it is scarcely accidental that in every episode
of the narrative madness figures prominently, as the price that
human nature has to pay for its location in a civilised
world.

Melmoth himself is the principle vehicle for Maturin's social
critique, but it is a motif constantly reiterated. The Jew
Adonijah says to Monçada, 'thou art come from where the
cruelty of man, permanent and persevering, unrelenting and
unmitigated, hath never failed to leave the proofs of its power
in abortive intellects, crippled frames, distorted creeds, and
ossified hearts'.89 Melmoth introduces 'civilisation'
to Immalee by describing how man has invented 'by means of
living in cities, a new and singular mode of aggravating human
wretchedness'.90 Civilisation is itself a form of
social madness, since it involves a multiplication of misery in
a way that is both unjustified and unnecessary: in addition to
the natural hazards of famine, disease and sterility, human
society heaps on top of this a multiplicity of artificial
miseries. Civilisation is closely identified with coercion in
the case of Immalee herself, when Melmoth refers to himself as
'the hunter of your form and your steps, even amid the
complicated and artificial tracks in which you have been
concealed by the false forms of existence you have embraced!'91 Immalee
expostulates, '"Embraced!" -- Oh no! they seized on me -- they
dragged me here -- they made me a Christian.'92

In Maturin's view the social contract is one that has only
inimical consequences: man sacrifices his freedom in return for
moral corruption. Since society places man out of key, the
sounds that it produces must necessarily be parallel: 'The
harmony of civilised society, of which she was at once weary and
proud, was discord to his ear. He had examined all the strings
that formed this curious but ill-constructed instrument and found
them all false.'93 Society frustrates man's noblest
impulses and finest energies, as Immalee/Isidora discovers:

All that day she thought how it was possible to liberate herself
from her situation, while the feeling that liberation was
impossible clung to the bottom of her heart; and this sensation
of the energies of the soul in all their strength, being in vain
opposed to imbecility and mediocrity, when {92} aided by
circumstances, is one productive alike of melancholy and
irritation. We feel, like prisoners in romance, bound by threads
to which the power of magic has given the force of adamant.94

This philosophic view conditions the nature of Maturin's own
narrative, which seeks not to move forward or resolve, but to
envelope, entangle and bind both reader and protagonist in a web
of social forces from which there is no possible release. Thus
the raison d'etre of Melmoth himself -- the 'extraordinary
being'95
whose offer of freedom with eternal damnation can become
meaningful only in a context where freedom is seen as requiring
so desperate a price.

The character of Melmoth himself, represented only in a
relatively brief section of the novel, is nevertheless
remarkably suggestive. The Gothic rhetoric of
hypocrite/double persists in that hypocrisy is a persistent
focus of religious inquiry (Monçada describes himself as
'the worst of all hypocrites'96), while Melmoth himself is the
malignant double who presents himself to the various
characters. The importance of Melmoth as a device is that he
transvalues the character of striving so often assigned to Romantic literature: he is
neither Don Juan nor Faust,
but Mephistopheles, Statue or Stone Guest. Melmoth represents
the exhaustion of the field Romantic possibility --
simultaneously the recognition of the emptiness of social
existence and the barrenness of postulated alternatives to it.
The subject of Melmoth the Wanderer is not a celebration of
imaginary but unlawful fields of possibility but an acceptance
of repetition, indifference, the dearth of possibility. For
Maturin there is both pathos and irony in the encounter of
Immalee and Melmoth, alternate sides of the Romantic coin - -
Immalee is the child of wonder, Melmoth the man who has become
incapable of it:

His destiny forbid alike curiosity or surprise. The world could
show him no greater marvel than his own existence; and the
facility with which he himself passed from region to region,
mingling with, yet distinct from his species, like a wearied and
uninterested spectator rambling through the various seats of some
vast theatre, where he knows none of the audience would have
prevented his feeling astonishment, {93} had he encountered
Isidora on the summit of the Andes.97

Melmoth can only corrupt Immalee, i.e. initiate her into the
nature of the world, yet paradoxically he has much in common
with her, since they both transcend it. Thus the novel
constitutes a dual indictment of man and the world he has made
from the position of impossibility.

In the closing sections of the narrative, the pretext of
diabolical intervention becomes transparent, since Maturin has
shown abundantly that the evils he depicts are of human
contrivance. It is therefore only appropriate that Melmoth
himself should demystify the idea of the devil:

'Enemy of mankind!' the speaker continued -- 'Alas, how absurdly
is that title bestowed on the great angelic chief, the morning
star fallen from its sphere! What enemy has man so deadly as
himself? If he would ask on whom he should bestow that title
aright, let him smite his bosom, and his heart will answer --
Bestow it here!'98

The true meaning of Melmoth's alienation from the world, the fact
that 'I have traversed the world in the search, and no one, to
gain that world, would lose his own soul!'99 is that he
has seen the vacuity and malignancy of the world that man has
constructed for himself -- a recognition that no one else is
willing to share. For, as Maturin points out, in a striking
anticipation of Nietzsche -- and what is Melmoth after all if not
Zarathustra born early? --

In a morbid state of heart, we cannot bear truth -- the falsehood
that intoxicates us for a moment, is worth more than the truth
that would disenchant us for life -- I hate him because he
tells me the truth, is the language natural to the human
mind, from the slave of power to the slave of passion.100

Yet perhaps even here we might detect a tinge of qualified
optimism, for Maturin does not present man's repugnance for truth
as completely endemic -- or, at least, there is a shift of
emphasis from one sentence to the next! -- in that his suggestion
{94} that it is natural to the human mind is prefaced by the
ascription of such a condition to a morbid state of heart. For no
matter how pessimistic the Romantic writer may be, he
is always capable, at least in theory, of postulating a better or
nobler state, of invoking the possibility of a man or world that
is not warped, perverted or perverse.

Admittedly signs of such optimism are still harder to find in James Hogg's The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the very
title of which is redolent with irony, since his protagonist
indeed regards himself as a justified person, and justified
precisely in the fact that he sins. Hogg's novel is one which
in its ingenuity and subtlety always goes beyond its overt and
ostensible intentions. The novel, the hero of which, as a
staunch Calvinist convinced
of his own righteousness, is persuaded by the Devil that his mandate
therefore extends to the destruction of whomsoever might be
deemed wicked, might be thought to have a certain surface
plausibleness and to function moderately well as a malicious
cautionary tale. But its true power stems from its penetration
and insight as a portrait of a disturbed and paranoid
consciousness, of what Mrs Radcliffe would have styled a
'vitiated mind'.101 But, of course, to speak of such
a 'vitiated mind' immediately raises a problem that is seldom
absent in the Gothic:
which is that the notion of a vitiated mind erodes all sense of
moral integrity on the part of the individual. The mind is
always deemed to have some capacity for self-rectification; if
the individual sins or goes astray then conscience or a sense of
guilt will work powerfully to restore the individual to the path
of righteousness and to redress the balance. But with a
vitiated mind there can be no such guarantee. The mind, as
vitiated, has no power to stabilise or reorient itself, and,
having once gone askew, finds its attempts to get itself back on
course warped by the very fact that the course to which it is
trying to return is the wrong one. Such is the case with Robert
Wringhim Colwan. It is not that he possesses no moral sense, no
conviction of the difference between good and evil: it is rather
that his pride and self-certainty as a 'justified' person make
possible his temptation by the Devil, who may be Maturin's devil
within, so that his tragedy or catastrophe is not simply that he
sins by killing with calculation and brutality individuals who
are essentially blameless, but that he himself is completely
incapable {95} of recognising the fact. His own self-consistent
rationality becomes more dangerous than the most chaotic
madness: it is an irrationalism that does not know its own
nature, a closed consciousness that cannot escape from its own
terms and constructions.

Yet, although Hogg criticises the excesses and dangers of the
belief in justification, he does so from a standpoint that is
characteristically Protestant, that insists on the value of
private judgement. For his sinner is not simply proud, he is
also unduly deferential: he succumbs almost completely to the
admonitions of his diabolic second self, regarding him as 'one
who knew right and wrong much better than I did',102 referring
to his ascendancy over him as being 'as complete as that of a
huntsman over his dogs'103 and describing him as 'my
tyrant'.104 Moreover, lack of openness and
sincerity can also be seen as a cause of his downfall, since
Wringhim/Colwan is a solitary, incommunicative person and by
failing to discuss his new acquaintance with others, thereby
places himself more completely in the hands of a nightmarish
solipsism. By regarding himself as simply the instrument of a
divine purpose and nothing more, he devalues his own spiritual
identity and his own freedom as an individual. He becomes a
cypher in the cause of a good that it is in reality evil, and
Hogg thereby implies that such an evil is generated by the
denegation of his own authenticity as a free and responsible
person. For Wringhim/Colwan's assumption of his tremendous
might as a justified person produces a cognate sense of his own
nullity. In presenting his memoirs to the reader he insists
that it is only his great purpose and not he that will render
them of interest, a suggestion that could not be more deeply
ironic:

I depended entirely on the bounty of free grace, holding all the
righteousness of man as filthy rags, and believing in the
momentous and magnificent truth, that the more heavily loaden
with transgressions, the more welcome was the believer at the
throne of grace. And I have reason to believe that it was this
dependence and this belief that at last ensured my acceptance
there.

I come now to the most important period of my existence, -- the
period that has modelled my character, and influenced every
action of my life, -- without which, this {96} detail of my
actions would have been as a tale that hath been told -- a
monotonous farrago -- an uninteresting harangue -- in
short, a thing of nothing. Whereas, lo! it must now be a
relation of great and terrible actions, done in the might, and
by the commission of heaven. Amen.105

Self-assertion and self-liquidation are mysteriously combined.

Wringhim/Colwan's actions appear almost entirely involuntary and
to be produced by processes over which he can scarcely be deemed
to have control, but there is a problem as to how this
involuntariness is itself produced. Undoubtedly Hogg sees Calvinism itself as responsible
in part for this state of affairs, since election itself is a
problematic question and notions of predestination make the
individual's own part in his actions seem obscure. At an early
age Hogg's protagonist sins freely but regards his sins as
accidents and his inability to repent of them as something for
which he cannot be blamed: 'the grace of repentance being
withheld from me, I regarded myself as in no degree accountable
for the failure'.106 In Hogg's presentation of it
Calvinism is capable of being a religion in which energy takes
the place of conscience and reason, in which the believer
transforms himself into a moral automaton and unquestioningly
hurls himself into the murk of the predestined -- in the words
of Gil-Martin, his diabolic confidante,

Depend on it, the advice of the great preacher is genuine:

"What thine hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might, for
none of us knows what a day may bring forth? That is, none of
us knows what is pre-ordained, but whatever is pre-ordained we
must do, and none of these things will be laid to our
charge.'107

In some sense the second self of Wringhim/Colwan is therefore
liberated by Calvinism; however, even here the question of moral
responsibility is obscure, for, since he has been brainwashed by
his mother and father, since he has simply followed their
guidance, since he is the product of their ideological
conditioning, in what real sense can he be held to blame? Like
other religious hypocrites, Wringhim/Colwan's fate is to lose
touch with himself and with the sources of inner spontaneity. The
forcing of his conscience has the effect of {97} distorting his
behaviour, of creating inward monitions that are not truly his
own but those of his second self, which both is and is not him.
The double reinforces and rewards the inauthentic within him. He
becomes a sleepwalker who performs actions without truly knowing
why he does them. He is possessed in the fullest sense of the
word. Even before his killing of the saintly minister Mr
Blanchard he dreams of it: 'Thus, by dreaming of the event by
night, and discoursing of it by day, it soon became so familiar
to my mind, that I almost conceived it as done.'108 Yet even
the commission of it has an involuntary character. Just as Jim in
Conrad's Lord Jim jumps before he even realises that he
has done so, so Wringhim/Colwan's killing is one that he simply
reports on without intending: 'and that moment my piece was
discharged'.109 His subsequent murders become
still more distorted: he takes Gil-Martin's word for it that he
has slain his brother in combat instead of killing him
deceitfully from behind; he has no consciousness at all of
murdering his mother and his late father's mistress. If his
invasion by a second self represents the triumph of the
involuntary, the presence of a second self is a paralysis and
suspension of reason: 'over the singular delusion that I was two
persons, my reasoning faculties had no power'110 In effect
the existence of a double represents a hiatus in the personality,
an inability to correlate aspects of identity, where
contradictory aspects separately and unco-ordinately pursue
distinct purposes:

I had heart-burnings, longings, and yearnings, that would not be
satisfied; and I seemed hardly to be an accountable creature;
being thus in the habit of executing transactions of the utmost
moment, without being sensible that I did them. I was a being
incomprehensible to myself. Either I had a second self, who
transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times
possessed by a spirit over which it had no controul, and of whose
actions my own soul was wholly unconscious. This was an anomaly
not to be accounted for by any philosophy of mine, and I was many
times, in contemplating it, excited to terrors and mental
torments hardly describable. To be in a state of consciousness
and unconsciousness, at the same time, in the same body and the
same spirit, was impossible.111

{98} What he feels is not the traditional guilt or remorse but
powerlessness and impotence; if not responsible, the self that
does not know becomes derealised. For identity is traditionally
associated with volition, and, although the volitions that he is
not consciously in control of may indeed be his volitions, they
nevertheless become menacing, because in the multiplications of
selves he ceases to know whether there is an authoritative
standpoint from which his actions can be viewed. He,
Wringhim/Colwan, is caught between the other that advises him
and the other that acts. He is a voyeur of himself in which the
self he sees may be truer than the self that inspects, so that
all theories of the examined self become falsified:

I was become a terror to myself; or rather, my body and soul were
become terrors to each other; and, had it been possible, I felt
as if they would have gone to war. I dared not look at my face in
the glass, for I shuddered at my own image and likeness. I
dreaded the dawning, and trembled at the approach of night, nor
was there one thing in nature that afforded me the least
delight.112

Night signifies the fear of a still further deconstruction of
the personality; morning an awakening to the loss of self that
might have seemed initially only a bad dream. In the last
stages of the novel the double takes over completely. Colwan
dons Gil-Martin's garb of green frock-coat and turban as a
disguise, which thus becomes the symbol of his alienation from
mankind. He is truly an outcast, since he has lost his
humanity. The episodes that occur are of a symbolic nature: he
is caught in the threads of the weaver's loom, representing his
capture in the tortuous threads of a distorted reason, his
enclosure in the stables with wild and maddened horses a sign of
derangement in reason and in the world. If he is damned it is
because he is no longer accountable.

The last vestiges of Wringhim/Colwan's identity are associated
with doubting. His fall is associated with the demise of inner
spontaneity; he refers to Gil-Martin as 'my great companion and
counsellor, who tyrannised over every spontaneous movement of my
heart'.113
Yet, though incapable of acting, he continues to doubt. He
questions that the elect are infallible, he is overwhelmed by
doubts that hold him back {99} from killing his brother, he
fears that fratricide is a mortal sin, and so on. His killing
of his brother is also the murder of himself, because in that
moment the last vestiges of independence and autonomy are
violated. There is nothing now that can hold him back.

Hogg's justified Sinner
becomes a Superman. He is led beyond the normal paths of human
action and the ordinary constraints of human morality to a
transcendental position in which he believes he is capable of
judging all other men. As a justified person 'An exaltation of
spirit lifted me, as it were, far above the earth, and the
sinful creatures crawling on its surface; and I deemed myself as
an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking
down with pity and contempt on the grovelling creatures
below.'114
As judge of others, he consequently lacks any capacity to judge
himself. Good and evil are merely functions of his own actions
-- values that flow from what he does and not criteria distinct
from them. Yet as a supremely self-validating law he is also
the most powerless and abject of men, faced with a self,
behaviour and actions that have become indecipherable. That it
is his will and identity that are imperilled Hogg makes
abundantly clear in the closing pages, when the sinner is
tormented by hideous fiends: 'Horrible as my assailants were in
appearance, (and they had all monstrous shapes,) I felt that I
would rather have fallen into their hands, than be thus held
captive by my defender at his will and pleasure, without having
the right or power to say my life, or any part of my will, was
my own.'115
Of all his victims his fate is the worst. The loss of a soul
could not be more vividly demonstrated.

Following the publication of The Monk the discourse of
the Gothic is significantly transposed. From good and noble
heroines and heroes whose autonomy, freedom and happiness are
thwarted by an oppressive, unjust and hypocritical society the
emphasis shifts to the hypocrite and the oppressor. Yet,
paradoxically, the criminal hypocrite is accorded a great deal
more sympathy than might be expected. The Gothic heroes are
perhaps the first fictional protagonists to be thoroughly
saturated with negativity, though Milton's Satan and Richardson's Lovelace are
their obvious precursors. Psychology becomes a more crucial
concern than social criticism, though this presentation of
pyschological processes {100} itself embodies a social critique,
since, if the characters' minds are vitiated, their upbringing
and social and ideological conditioning have importantly
contributed to that state of affairs. It is perhaps one of the
great contradictions of Romantic literature, as a
literature that posits an autonomous self at war with society,
that it should simultaneously indicate how problematic that
category of the individual is. The Gothic hero is a spiritual
cripple, a man in whom the springs of action have dried up,
whose attempts to define himself liberate violence, cruelty and
madness. But this presence only manifests itself as the truth
of the initial absence.

Lewis's reformulation proved
influential not simply because of The Monk's great
success, but also because the path he indicated was politically expedient.
Fiction in the preceding decade had had a radical cast in which
major institutions of British society were questioned and
criticised and where democratic values came to the fore. But
after The Monk the critical side of Gothic goes
underground. In practice many of the targets are the same; for
the Church is a major institution in any society of the time and
plays a crucial role in maintaining the dominant ideology and in
reinforcing reactionary politics. Holcroft had attacked the
Church in Hugh Trevor. But, in making religious hypocrisy,
especially as manifested in the Catholic Church, a principle
target, the Gothic novelists could dissociate themselves from
any imputation of supporting radical or revolutionary politics
and suggest that their work implied nothing more than the
superiority of British culture and British religion to the
perverse, alien and corrupted ways of foreigners. That the
Gothic always walks a tightrope is attributable not purely and
simply to the nature of the genre itself but also to its
character as a radical and political discourse that persists in
a social context that is hostile and alien to it.

A major problem in the Gothic centres on the notion
of involuntary action. The Gothic protagonist typically finds
himself performing actions that he did not necessarily intend or
envisage. He becomes tied in knots of his own devising and
bound by previous involvements and commitments; the very nature
of his actions and the reasons for them acquire such an
obscurity that he does things while scarcely knowing why, and he
scarcely seems to be 'an accountable creature', in Hogg's {101}
phrase. Yet on the face of it there seems to be no obvious
reason why religious hypocrisy should have such catastrophic
consequences or why it should generate a second self over which
the individual has no control. One might equally well argue
that the hypocrite, as an actor playing a part, would know
better than most at what point feigning ends. But, according to
Godwin, whose political
philosophy and psychology cast such a spell over the Gothic,
this is not the case. And, of course, Godwin's political
thought is importantly grounded in his analysis of human
dispositions. Not the least ground of his criticism of an
oppressive and authoritarian society is that it is harmful to
all, including the oppressors. It is to this axiom that the
Gothic holds fast. For Godwin, an established church has the
most severe consequences for its members, since it is a machine
for spiritual coercion and the production of hypocrisy, in which
individuals are compelled to assent to and espouse doctrines in
which they do not truly believe. Similarly, Maturin refers to
the 'fatal lesson of monastic institutions', 'the necessity of
imposition'.116 For Godwin, religion cannot
represent the dictates of conscience; otherwise it would not be
necessary. Therefore it can only represent the deformation of
conscience, the perversion of all true thought and feeling:

The sublimest worship becomes transformed into a source of
depravity when it is not consecrated by the testimony of a pure
conscience. Truth is the second object in this respect, integrity
of heart is the first: or rather, a proposition that, in its
abstract nature, is truth itself converts into rank falsehood and
mortal poison, if it be professed with the lips only, and abjured
by the understanding. It is then the foul garb of hypocrisy.
Instead of elevating the mind above sordid temptations, it
perpetually reminds the worshipper of the degrading subjection to
which he has yielded. Instead of filling him with sacred
confidence, it overwhelms him with confusion and remorse.117

So that hypocrisy represents a rent in and disruption of
consciousness, an intrusion from without that generates
contradiction and instability in the mind.

Godwin objects to codes of religious conformity, such as the
{102} Thirty Nine Articles, which were regularly signed by
individuals who did not subscribe to all of them, because their
tendency is 'to make men hypocrites'.118 He bitterly attacks the
arguments, casuistical in intent and consequence, that have been
used to justify such acts of subscription. For Godwin truth and
untruth cannot exist side by side and he attacks such duplicity
in terms that seem curiously prophetic of the direction taken by
the Gothic novel:

Can we believe that men shall enter upon their profession with so
notorious a perversion of reason and truth, and that no
consequences will flow from it, to infect their general
character? Rather, can we fail to compare their unnatural and
unfortunate state with the wisdom and virtue which the same
industry and virtue might unquestionably have produced, if they
had been left to their genuine operation? They are like the
victims of Circe, to whom human understanding was preserved
entire, that they might more exquisitely feel their degraded
condition.119

The Gothic protagonist is such a figure: a man of signal
capacities warped and distorted by society and by his upbringing
who is led astray from his true path. In becoming other than he
is he becomes yet other than he is, yet always the conscious and
unavailing witness of his own degradation and destruction.

According to Godwin, the price paid by the hypocrite, or the man
who lacks sincerity, is very extensive. In his attempts to
manipulate others he becomes less than a man. Discussing the
virtues of sincerity, the core of Godwin's political thought,
Godwin writes,

Reserve, deceitfulness, and an artful exhibition of ourselves
take from the human form its soul, and leave us the unanimated
semblance of what man might have been; of what he would have
been, were not every impulse of the mind thus stunted and
destroyed. If our emotions were not checked, we should be truly
friends with each other. Our character would expand: the luxury
of indulging our feelings, would raise us to the stature of
men.120

For Godwin the integrity of the individual is grounded in the
spontaneity of his thoughts and impulses. Once they are {103}
subject to constraint and once a man acts as though he thinks
and feels other than really is the case, not only does he lose
the core of his identity, but, in addition, his own deceits
become a veil through which he becomes unable to perceive or
analyse his own behaviour. The cardinal doctrine of the
examined self is put in question, both because the individual
has no authentic self and because he has no power to examine
it. If, as a sincere person, 'I should not harbour bad passions
and unsocial propensities, because the habit of expressing my
thoughts would enable me to detect and dismiss them in the
outset',121
then, conversely, as a hypocrite I should have no control over
my behaviour and be at the mercy of destructive and anti-social
passions. In hypocrisy the self becomes occluded. A barrier is
raised in the mind between a hypocritical and socially generated
false consciousness and the impulses that lie beneath it. If
integrity is a function of a transparency and clarity in the
mind and conscience in which everything can be clearly viewed,
the hypocrite finds his mind transformed into an impenetrable
gloom, in which the second self that he dimly espies can be
nothing other than himself, yet is a self whom he neither knows
nor recognises. The hypocrite can act with impunity, since
there is nothing to hold him back. His dark actions are not
truly his, since there is no one there who can possess them or
know them or assume responsibility for them. Perverse drives
are the product of a perverse reason that thwarts and represses
everything that is natural and spontaneous. Moreover, this
hypocrisy involves an oppressive and manipulative relation to
others rather than a relation based on cordiality, sincerity and
mutual respect, so that its emotional truth can only be
displayed as domination and violence. In going against every
natural human feeling, by making others mere objects and victims
of an uncontrollable destructiveness, he shows what happens when
such natural feelings are destroyed in the first place. Yet the
Gothic protagonist is himself finally not to blame. His crimes
are society's crimes, his victims theirs. It is civilisation
that produces hypocrisy and bad faith. The misdirected
struggles of the Gothic are both a symptom of that and an
involuntary and perverse rebellion. Yet who can truly witness
this madness? Not society, not the hapless individual -- only
the reader who can ponder the implications of their fate.